Geek Defined

If a geek is just a per­son who’s really into one spe­cific thing, I don’t think I can really call myself a geek. My inter­ests are pretty damn eclectic.

How­ever, no mat­ter the topic, I have an over­ar­ch­ing desire to under­stand how and why things are the way they are. I sup­pose that’s why I ended up with a degree in psy­chol­ogy with a sta­tis­tics empha­sis. If, as I have said before, psy­chol­ogy is the appli­ca­tion of sci­ence to philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing, then sta­tis­tics is the foun­da­tion of the empir­i­cal method of doing same. It is the analy­sis of obser­va­tions of glean mean­ing out of the seem­ingly ran­dom and/​or overly com­plex nature of the world.

And to those who would claim that math and sci­ence is soul­less, I would argue there is some­thing amaz­ing about an ele­gant proof to a com­pli­cated prob­lem. Like­wise, graphs, the visual form of sta­tis­tics, can make incred­i­bly com­plex data imme­di­ately under­stand­able and relate-​able.

Here are some of my recent favorites:

(from HIMYM, Marshall’s pie chart of his favorite bars and bar graph of his favorite pies.)

(from SFoodie, an actu­ally baked Venn dia­gram of pies.)

(from The Expend­ables, a movie poster with the pre­vi­ous kill counts of all the stars of the movie.)

For more fun graphs like these, check out Graph­Jam. For a more seri­ous dis­cus­sion of stats, try 538.

But that last pic­ture really got me. The orig­i­nal poster with just the action stars of my child­hood is already pretty damn bad-​ass, but adding their kill counts just gives it so much more depth. That’s why I can’t wait for aug­mented real­ity tech­nol­ogy to become viable. In the mean­time, I’ll just have to set­tle for Google Goggles.

OK, now to run before the vio­lence geeks find me.

Incom­ing search terms:

• himym mar­shall

Tags: Food, Technology